UK to set up working group on frozen pension issue
From Retirement Dec 21 2011 BY: Helen Burggraf
, Contributing Editor
, International Adviser
The UK government is to set up a so-called working group to look into the issue of frozen pensions, in response to years of pressure from expatriate pensioners and politicians.
The working group will include officials from the Treasury as well as members of the International Consortium of British Pensioners (ICBP), a lobby group which has been campaigning hard on behalf of expatriate Britons whose UK pensions have been “frozen”, or not "up-rated" to keep pace with inflation, the way the pensions of Brits living in certain other countries are.
Details as to when the working group will meet were not given.
In a statement, the ICBP noted that the news of the working group came as an ‘e-petition’ on the subject of frozen pensions had gone above 13,500 signatures, which it said made it “one of the most popular petitions in the country”.
The organisation encourages visitors to its website to sign the petition, saying "13,500 have, please join them".
John Markham, UK director of the ICBP, said the government's willingness to set up a working group showed that it was finally "taking the issue of frozen pensions seriously".
"However, we at the International Consortium of British Pensioners recognise that our work is still not done. We will therefore continue working to ensure that the government takes concrete action on the issue," he added.
The pensioners' group has long argued that the issue of frozen pensions affects more than half a million British pensioners worldwide, who live in the 150 countries around the world where their pensions are frozen at the rate that they were when they first moved abroad (or first started to receive them, if they were already overseas).
Some of the most popular overseas retirement destinations for British pensioners are on the UK's "frozen-pension list", including New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong.
The expat pensioners' long-running effort to gain pension parity through the court system ended in March 2010, when the European Court of Human Rights ruled against them. It held that Britain's refusal to link the penisons to inflation, the way it does those of retirees living in the UK and in certain other countries, was not discriminatory.